
Open Water
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Narrated by:
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Caleb Azumah Nelson
About this listen
A stunning, shattering debut novel about two Black artists falling in and out of love.
Two young people meet at a pub in South East London. Both are Black British, both won scholarships to private schools where they struggled to belong, both are now artists - he a photographer, she a dancer - trying to make their mark in a city that by turns celebrates and rejects them. Tentatively, tenderly, they fall in love. But two people who seem destined to be together can still be torn apart by fear and violence.
At once an achingly beautiful love story and a potent insight into race and masculinity, Open Water asks what it means to be a person in a world that sees you only as a Black body, to be vulnerable when you are respected only for strength, to find safety in love, only to lose it. With gorgeous, soulful intensity, Caleb Azumah Nelson has written the most essential debut of recent years.
©2021 Caleb Azumah Nelson. Recorded by arrangement with Black Cat, an imprint of Grove Atlantic, Inc. (P)2021 Audible, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
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An intimate, bracingly intelligent debut novel about a millennial Irish expat who becomes entangled in a love triangle with a male banker and a female lawyer. Ava, newly arrived in Hong Kong from Dublin, spends her days teaching English to rich children. Julian is a banker. A banker who likes to spend money on Ava, to have sex and discuss fluctuating currencies with her. But when she asks whether he loves her, he cannot say more than "I like you a great deal".
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It was ok...
- By zobo on 06-25-20
By: Naoise Dolan
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The End of Loneliness
- By: Benedict Wells, Charlotte Collins - translator
- Narrated by: Luke Thompson
- Length: 8 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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I've known Death a long time but now Death knows me. When their idyllic childhood is shattered by the sudden death of their parents, siblings Marty, Liz and Jules are sent to a bleak state boarding school. Once there, the orphans' lives change tracks: Marty throws himself into academic life; Liz is drawn to dark forms of escapism; and Jules transforms from a vivacious child to a withdrawn teenager.
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Incredible!
- By Fleure on 01-30-19
By: Benedict Wells, and others
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Bad Habit
- A Novel
- By: Alana S. Portero, Mara Faye Lethem - translator
- Narrated by: Alexandra Grey
- Length: 5 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Anchored by the voice of its sweet and defiant narrator, Bad Habit casts a trans woman’s trying youth as a heartfelt odyssey. Raised in an animated yet impoverished blue-collar neighborhood, Alana S. Portero’s protagonist struggles to find her place. As the city around her changes–the heroin epidemic that ravages Madrid through the '80s and '90s, rallying calls of worker solidarity and the pulsing beat of the city's night scene– she becomes increasingly detached from the world and, most crucially, herself.
By: Alana S. Portero, and others
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Breasts and Eggs
- By: Mieko Kawakami
- Narrated by: Emily Woo Zeller, Jeena Yi
- Length: 15 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Breasts & Eggs paints a portrait of contemporary womanhood in Japan and recounts the intimate journeys of three women as they confront oppressive mores and their own uncertainties on the road to finding peace and futures they can truly call their own. It tells the story of three women: the 30-year-old Natsu, her older sister, Makiko, and Makiko’s daughter, Midoriko. Makiko has traveled to Tokyo in search of an affordable breast enhancement procedure. She is accompanied by Midoriko, who has recently grown silent.
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Masterful Writing and Performance
- By Noelle on 03-01-21
By: Mieko Kawakami
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Homegoing
- A Novel
- By: Yaa Gyasi
- Narrated by: Dominic Hoffman
- Length: 13 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Two half sisters, Effia and Esi, unknown to each other, are born into different villages in 18th-century Ghana. Effia is married off to an Englishman and will live in comfort in the palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle, raising children who will be sent abroad to be educated before returning to the Gold Coast to serve as administrators of the empire. Esi, imprisoned beneath Effia in the castle's women's dungeon and then shipped off on a boat bound for America, will be sold into slavery.
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A Novel in Stories
- By Daryl on 06-19-16
By: Yaa Gyasi
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Paradise Rot
- A Novel
- By: Jenny Hval, Marjam Idriss - translator
- Narrated by: Brie Jackman
- Length: 3 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Jo is in a strange new country for university and having a more peculiar time than most. In a house with no walls, shared with a woman who has no boundaries, she finds her strange home coming to life in unimaginable ways. Jo's sensitivity and all her senses become increasingly heightened and fraught, as the lines between bodies and plants, dreaming and wakefulness, blur and mesh.
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Wrong Voice
- By Orville on 08-18-24
By: Jenny Hval, and others
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Evenings and Weekends
- A Novel
- By: Oisín McKenna
- Narrated by: Isabel Adomakoh-Young
- Length: 9 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Summer in London stops for no one. Not the half-naked drunks and stoners, the bachelorette parties glugging from bejewelled bottles, the drag queens puffing on hurried cigarettes. It’s June 2019, and everyone has converged on the city’s parks, beer gardens, and street corners to revel in the collective joys of being alive. Everyone but Maggie. She’s 30, pregnant, and broke.
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Amazing Narration
- By Kristen on 03-12-25
By: Oisín McKenna
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If Beale Street Could Talk
- A Novel
- By: James Baldwin
- Narrated by: Bahni Turpin
- Length: 7 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Told through the eyes of Tish, a 19-year-old girl in love with Fonny, a young sculptor who is the father of her child, Baldwin's story mixes the sweet and the sad. Tish and Fonny have pledged to get married, but Fonny is falsely accused of a terrible crime and is imprisoned. Their families set out to clear his name, and as they face an uncertain future, the young lovers experience a kaleidoscope of emotions - affection, despair, and hope.
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The narrator did her thing, I love it!!!
- By Vicky on 03-22-16
By: James Baldwin
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Monstrilio
- By: Gerardo Sámano Córdova
- Narrated by: Victoria Villarreal, Johnny Rey Diaz
- Length: 7 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Grieving mother Magos cuts out a piece of her deceased eleven-year-old son Santiago's lung. Acting on fierce maternal instinct and the dubious logic of an old folktale, she nurtures the lung until it gains sentience, growing into the carnivorous little Monstrilio she keeps hidden within the walls of her family's decaying Mexico City estate. Eventually, Monstrilio begins to resemble the Santiago he once was, but his innate impulses—though curbed by his biological and chosen family's communal care—threaten to destroy this fragile second chance at life.
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Not exactly what I expected….
- By kisa on 10-06-23
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The Pisces
- A Novel
- By: Melissa Broder
- Narrated by: Melissa Broder
- Length: 8 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Lucy has been writing her dissertation on Sappho for nine years when she and her boyfriend break up in a dramatic flameout. After she bottoms out in Phoenix, her sister in Los Angeles insists Lucy dog-sit for the summer. Annika's home is a gorgeous glass cube on Venice Beach, but Lucy can find little relief from her anxiety - not in the Greek chorus of women in her love addiction therapy group, not in her frequent Tinder excursions, not even in Dominic the foxhound's easy affection.
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What just happened?
- By Tammy on 05-06-18
By: Melissa Broder
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Love Radio
- By: Ebony LaDelle
- Narrated by: Joniece Abbott-Pratt, JaQwan J. Kelly
- Length: 8 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Prince Jones is the guy with all the answers—or so it seems. After all, at seventeen, he has his own segment on Detroit’s popular hip-hop show, Love Radio, where he dishes out advice to the brokenhearted. Prince has always dreamed of becoming a DJ and falling in love. But being the main caretaker for his mother, who has multiple sclerosis, and his little brother means his dreams will stay just that and the only romances in his life are the ones he hears about from his listeners. Until he meets Dani Ford.
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Let Love In
- By Meka on 08-30-22
By: Ebony LaDelle
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The Interestings
- A Novel
- By: Meg Wolitzer
- Narrated by: Jen Tullock
- Length: 15 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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The summer that Nixon resigns, six teenagers at a summer camp for the arts become inseparable. Decades later the bond remains powerful, but so much else has changed. In The Interestings, Wolitzer follows these characters from the height of youth through middle age, as their talents, fortunes, and degrees of satisfaction diverge. The kind of creativity that is rewarded at age 15 is not always enough to propel someone through life at age 30; not everyone can sustain, in adulthood, what seemed so special in adolescence.
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Needs a better title, but a good read (listen)
- By Tango on 04-12-13
By: Meg Wolitzer
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Sorrow and Bliss
- A Novel
- By: Meg Mason
- Narrated by: Emilia Fox
- Length: 10 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Martha Friel just turned forty. Once, she worked at Vogue and planned to write a novel. Now, she creates internet content. She used to live in a pied-à-terre in Paris. Now she lives in a gated community in Oxford, the only person she knows without a PhD, a baby or both, in a house she hates but cannot bear to leave. But she must leave, now that her husband Patrick—the kind who cooks, throws her birthday parties, who loves her and has only ever wanted her to be happy—has just moved out.
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Very Disappointed -- 2.75 Stars
- By Sharlotte on 06-07-21
By: Meg Mason
Pretty boring monotone narration.
Two stars for descriptions. Otherwise..a snooze fest.
I'm editing my review after persevering through the first 20 chapters. This story really picks up around it's 22nd chapter. It is really a heartfelt introspection into black immigration masculinity. A genre that doesn't come along everyday. While it may have taken too long to build up, one finally sees purpose in the backdrop the author develops so languarously. The 2nd person narration truly adds up when a man steps out of himself to look at himself.
Read on. It's definitely worthwhile, especially if race, masculinity, and mental health are of interest to you. I'm thoroughly impressed.
initially meh...but...
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Black Love
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A slow burn
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I am conflited
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Love Story Distracted
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Powerful
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Monotone
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Beautiful
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done very well. you will truly enjoy it
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It’s like I never knew words, feelings, could be described as they were. And it was so beautiful.
It talked of a perspective others have tried to describe, yet this book makes it feel as if it were told for the first time.
I cannot wait for a few years, when I forget the details of this book, to be able to read/listen, and once again be reminded.
What a beautiful story
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